Stephen Kaus

When you are a baseball fan, spring is a time of hope and delusion. This year, if you are an Oakland A's fan, you can imagine that the A's will be fun to watch, if not a contender against the loaded Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Despite a fire sale...

Update: In the seven months since I wrote this, I have been pleased by the President's change of direction. I hope that this was one of many pushes in that direction. S.K.

On Meet the Press Sunday, Savannah Guthrie asked Obama insider Robert Gibbs the question that...

Fifty years ago today John F. Kennedy gave the greatest speech of my lifetime.

There were televisions in each classroom at El Rodeo Elementary School and we all watched the inauguration, the first one we had ever seen. Many people who I have met say the same thing happened...

Tonight I went to a campaign gathering for Jerry Brown and I was impressed. Not only is he completely comfortable in his own skin, he makes me much more comfortable with him than I was 35 years ago when he was first elected governor.

He seems to eschew...

Ty Wigginton played four innings at second base last night for the Baltimore Orioles in their 5-0 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays. He moved from first because Cowboy Joe West threw Julio Lugo, who was playing second base, out...

Major League Baseball marketing meeting:

Vice-President Marketing: We need to capitalize on the patriotic holidays.

Second Vice-President Marketing: Why don't we give a million dollars to help Walter Reed Hospital?

Vice-President Marketing: But that will cost us a million dollars. Isn't it enough that...

"This will not stand." President George H. W. Bush

Yesterday was already a bad day for baseball. Ken Griffey, Jr., whose sweet swing, acrobatic catches and low maintenance persona had lit up baseball for over 20 years, announced his retirement.

Our spirits brightened when we heard that Armando Galarraga was...

Random thoughts while zipping through the Sunday morning shows:

• Peggy Noonan says on This Week that the Administration does not speak seriously about economics, but rather "sounds like some kind of mix between 'rah-rah' and gobbledygook." Does she not realize that the ability of those in government to...

"I wish I had never touched steroids. It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era."

Now we officially know that Mark McGwire used Performance Enhancing Drugs ("PEDs")

What we don't know with...

UPDATE King asked Sessions no such questions and in agreed with both Leahy and Sessions that the hearings were excellent. King told Leahy and Sessions that "both of you have received wide acclaim." On what planet?

ORIGINAL POST Hey John King*. How about making some news?

We have spent the...

When the Senate hearings on the nomination of Judge Sondra Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court start Monday, one focus will be the case of Ricci v. New Haven. In Ricci, Judge Sotomayor concurred in a Court of Appeal opinion that affirmed a lower court decision that the New...

This morning's paper brought the sad news that Susan Jordan, one of our most courageous and resourceful attorneys, was killed last Friday in a private plane crash in Utah. Aside from Susan's successes in individual cases, her forty year legal career empowered both women attorneys and women crime victims.

Anyone who thought that they would obtain incisive coverage from Chris Matthews of all the torture news that is breaking was in for a disappointment Wednesday. Matthews does not know anything, so he shows old film clips, takes offense and yells.

The first segment featured the usual; a Republican, Senator...

The ownership of the Oakland Athletics does not really want fans to come to the ballpark. There is no other way to explain the systematic downgrading of the experience of attending a game and the As' refusal to provide the amenities that fans of every other team take for granted....

You have to hand one thing to Ari Fleischer. On Wednesday night, he nailed it when he told Chris Matthews, "Chris, do you ever not interrupt your guests, or is that all you'd like to do?"

The rest of what Fleischer said was total Bush-hack nonsense, but Matthews was...

I heard an amazing thing Saturday evening: an NFL broadcasting team that actually sounded like it was enjoying the game! And on Fox even, home of the portentous Joe Buck.

Kenny Albert, Daryl "Moose" Johnston and Tony "Goose" Siragusa rolled into the night appreciating the Arizona...

I didn't know the Washington Post ran press releases on its front page. But clearly, actual journalism was not practiced in Friday's interview with Bush "senior staffers" Joshua Bolten and Stephen Hadley.

Reporter Michael Abramowitz states that he participated in a "wide-ranging conversation lasting more than two hours"...

Last Monday, RealClearPolitics provided a forum for Bush White House Counselor Ed Gillespie to dissemble on "Myths and Facts About the Real Bush Record." This document should serve political science instructors well in the future as the epitome of dead end political propaganda.

I have not seen any debunking...

That was fun. The Tampa Bay Rays beat the Red Sox and send all the obnoxious fans of Red Sox Nation into the winter with tears in their bloodshot eyes. TBS rose to the occasion, with a crew that let the game unfold on its own and commented with...

In the New York Times, Adam Nagourney identifies "race" as one of the six factors that could prevent the election of Barack Obama. The others, as paraphrased by Mark Halperin, are "(1) not everyone who has recently registered as a Democrat may vote on Election Day; (2) the...